Today's special guest is Graham Charters. Graham works at IBM's development lab in Hursley, England. His past roles have included WebSphere Application Server development, and architecture responsibilities in WebSphere Business Integration, and Adapters. [...] Today Graham is going to talk to us today about the Service Component Architecture, or SCA.

Graham talks about what SCA is and includes a mention of the PECL package that enables PHP applications to work with multiple data sources seamlessly.

]]>Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:35:00 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6492http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6492
In his latest blog post, Adam Trachtenberg looks into the world of web services and comes out with three topics - SOAP, axis2, and SDO. He chooses to focus, though, on the last of these after working with it to really get a feel for what it can do.

n my role as eBay Platform Evangelist, I spend a lot of time exploring different XML technologies. SOAP is obviously the big one. No, it's not PEAR::SOAP or NuSOAP; it's axis2.

He talks a bit about what axis2 is and the need it fills in the web services world. He also talks about how it's been developed (not copied after SOAP, but more of a fresh start that happens to do the same things). After this quick look at axis2, though, he gets into the head of the post - SDO.

The other PHP XML extension I've been hearing a lot about is SDO. SDO is an attempt to provide a standard data interface regardless of the backend datasource. So, for example, you can interact with XML data in the exact same manner as information pulled from your database.

Adam decided to give it a try and see how it interacted with the eBay API with some simple code examples. The first of which looks through eBay Motors and finds the title and mileage for each of the items grabbed. It worked well, and didn't require too much more development than the SOAP predecesor, but there were a few quirks that made things a bit more difficult (like SDO's inability to completely consume a WSDL file and understand a SOAP service's functionality).

]]>Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:06:47 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6440http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6440
Graham Charters writes, in this new post on the IBM developerWorks PHP blog today, that the first release of their Service Component Architecture (v 0.1.0) has been released.

We've just made the first release of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) for PHP prototype available. SCA allows you to turn PHP classes into Web services by adding a few simple phpDocumentor-style annotations. SCA will automatically generate WSDL for these services when required.

SCA also uses the same annotations technique to allow PHP classes to declare dependencies on other Web services or PHP classes. At runtime it will then 'inject' proxies for these dependencies, which can then be used to call the Web services or classes

You can check out documentation for the project and some examples of how it works over on this page and a whitepaper here will give you the full scoop. If you're interested, be sure to check out the Google Group for the project too.

Specifically, he mentions two points - one dealing with the definition Jacob gave for the functionality and the other pointing out some better stats that Jscob didn't include in his comments.

]]>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 13:14:35 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6130http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6130
In his latest, Jacob Santos asks the question more and more people are wanting to know - why hasn't SDO really taken off?

Developers will eventually start using it, it will take some time to go from the PHP way to SDO way. It would be easier to jump into SDO once better, more easily interpreted and simple to understand tutorials, code samples, and support is available. IBM tutorials are a little bit technical, with words and complex pictures (UML). Just give me code and explain how it works and let me run with the SDO scissors in my hand.

He talks about the contributions that both Zend and IBM have made to the effort and the lack of features (well, the duplication of current PHP features - XML and database functionality). He has a positive outlook for the overall future of the project, stating that:

I'm quite sure that enough PHP developers are going to embrace SDO in the coming years depending on the coverage it gets that IBM and Zend's investment will pay off in the end.

]]>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:47:09 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5406http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5406
Caroline Maynard, a presenter at this year's php|tek conference, got enough feedback on her talk covering SDO in PHP that she's created a resource of the sample programs she demonstrated in the speech for users to download.
I've recently uploaded them to CVS. If you'd like to try them out, copy the whole /scenarios directory under your document root, and browse to it. Some of the commentary is bit terse, so do let us know if you can't make them work or find any problems.

]]>Sat, 20 May 2006 08:55:39 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5227http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5227
Graham Charters has posted a new item to the IBM developerWorks blog with pointers to the slides that he presented at the latest PHP Quebec conference covering the use of the SDO slides [pdf] I used at the PHP Quebec conference.

The conference was very well organised and there were a good number of very interesting talks. They don't appear to be available on the conference site, but Chris Shiflett's blog has a list of quite a few that are available elsewhere.

]]>Mon, 24 Apr 2006 07:28:20 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4373http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4373
this quick post with a simple example of how to use the SDO library to extract info from an XML document.

At last month's Zend Conference I was fortunate enough to attend Christian Wenz's tutorial on XML and Web services. This covered the use of technologies such as DOM and SimpleXML for working with XML data. As the title of this blog entry suggests, SDO provide a simple way to construct or extend XML documents.

The example below shows an XML schema used by an application which records information regarding quotations people have made. An XML document following this schema will contain a quotes element containing a number of quote elements, each of which consists of a phrase and an author element and a year attribute.

The code given is less than ten lines long, and is even shorter (by six lines) than a DOM method for doing the same thing - besides being more inuitive...]]>